As the United States leans on solar power to meet soaring energy needs, its reliance on a Chinese-made component has created a mounting security threat, according to energy industry executives and congressional investigators who warn it can be weaponized to trigger blackouts.
Research shared exclusively with The Washington Post reveals how deeply dependent U.S. power companies are on Chinese inverters. These devices are used by large solar installations to help transform energy harnessed from the sun into a current that is compatible with the power grid.
More than 85 percent of the utilities surveyed confidentially by research group Strider Technologies are using inverter devices made by companies with ties to the Chinese government and military. Many cybersecurity experts warn that the devices are vulnerable to hacking that can set off cascading outages.
Chinese officials say the warnings are unfounded. The researchers, however, found evidence that engineers in China have been studying how vulnerabilities in the U.S. grid could be exploited. While such studies are common in the industry — scientists around the globe routinely share knowledge on power grid resilience — some of the Chinese efforts unnerve U.S. officials in the context of China’s broader initiatives to infiltrate infrastructure.
“There is plenty of evidence that would suggest this is a risk that needs to be addressed,” said Thomas Fanning, former chairman and CEO of Southern Company, one of the largest power companies in America. He now chairs the executive committee of the Alliance for Critical Infrastructure, a nonprofit dedicated to safeguarding the systems of America’s leading companies in the energy, finance and communications sectors.
Should inverters be compromised, Fanning said in an interview, the risk goes “way beyond losing power … to potentially compromising other critical sector systems, including finance and communications.”
As the U.S. joined the world in ramping up solar power over the past decade, energy developers grew reliant on cheap Chinese components. The Chinese government subsidizes their production as it aims to dominate supply chains. U.S. inverter manufacturers have struggled to compete.
Solar power accounts for roughly 90 percent of the new energy added to America’s electricity system this year.
While assessments of the size and scope of blackouts China could inflict in the U.S. through rogue inverters vary, worry about the risk has spread to the highest levels of government. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which Congress created to monitor threats from China, took aim at ubiquitous Chinese inverters in a reportlast month that detailed how they could be weaponized, calling them “a vulnerability with serious national security implications.”
The commission noted that in November 2024 several of the devices in the U.S. were disabled by Chinese Manufacturer Ningbo Deye Technology amid a contract dispute.
The report landed just after 52 GOP lawmakers called on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to “restrict the future importation” of Chinese inverters. The letter cited a Reuters report from earlier this year that revealed unauthorized communication devices in Chinese inverters had been connected to the U.S. power grid.
“The capability is there; the gun is loaded,” said Greg Levesque, CEO of Strider, which used proprietary utility data to help gauge the extent of the threat. “Now we are debating whether they [the Chinese government] will pull the trigger and what the impact would be.”
Strider surveyed power companies accounting for 12 percent of the electricity generated nationwide and found almost all of them relied in some capacity on what it describes as risky inverters from China. Its report warns that “the Chinese government, through its control over [government-linked] firms and data networks, could exploit access to manipulate or disrupt the U.S. grid in a crisis.”
Chinese officials dispute the findings. Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy, wrote in an email that they are rooted in “distortion and smearing, in disregard of facts and without any basis, of China’s achievements in the field of energy infrastructure.”
But cybersecurity experts say many of the inverters are vulnerable to tampering from afar. Some U.S. researchers warn an attack on a few large solar installations could do exactly what Chinese engineers have outlined in what Strider says are dozens of studies: wreak havoc on the broader grid, bringing blackouts to entire regions. An attack could seek to replicate the frequency disruptions that recently collapsed the power grid in Spain and Portugal.
“You don’t need to turn off the entire western area power [grid] to create societal panic,” said one U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. “All you need to do is create some number of significant incidents that are widely reported to create the same effect.”
While technical experts at the Energy Department and its national labs raised concerns about the security risks associated with Chinese inverters during the Biden administration, senior policymakers overlooked those warnings, the official said.
“They were not excited to hear that clean energy technology made in China could pose a speed bump in the green energy transition,” the official said.
Biden officials tried to kick-start more domestic clean energy technologies, including inverters, hoping to shift production out of China. But subsidies for such clean energy manufacturing were cut by the Trump administration.
The Energy Department said in a statement that “it is critical” for energy project developers to “have a full understanding of the capabilities of the products received” and that the Trump administration “is committed to reducing dependence on foreign supply chains.”
Federal officials have directed power companies to closely monitor or disable outside communication with the inverters at key choke points on the grid.
But there are thousands of U.S. utilities and energy developers, and many operate under loose security protocols, with regulators loath to impose restrictions amid a national power crunch.
And some officials question the extent of the threat.
The Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities in that state, turned up little concern in a recent investigation.
That commission’s vice chair, Nick Myers, who led the inquiry, called the issue a “nothingburger.”
“Either the companies aren’t using those particular inverters, or they are using so few of them that, if they were all to turn off at the same time, it wouldn’t be much of a problem,” he said.
As dozens of U.S. lawmakers call for Chinese inverter bans, many experts warn banning the component — or requiring it be ripped out from U.S. infrastructure — creates its own problems.
“We don’t have a choice to buy all this gear from anywhere else right now,” said Patrick Miller, a cybersecurity expert who testified before the U.S.-China commission in April. “There is no place to buy it. If you try to rip it out and replace it, there won’t be enough power for all the things we need to do.”
He is calling for Chinese-made inverters to be vetted and certified by U.S. security officials, to make sure they have been stripped of unauthorized communication devices and cannot be manipulated. Even that would be complicated and costly.
Some U.S. companies aren’t waiting. Rooftop solar giant Enphase, for example, says security concerns motivated it to source most of its inverters domestically, despite the added cost. Enphase co-founder Raghu Belur said stricter U.S. security rules would spur more companies to build inverter factories here.
The U.S.-China commission warns in its report that China could at any time stop sales or restrict access to inverters in the U.S. to hurt its adversary.
Robert M. Lee, CEO of industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos, shares that concern. “If we have a conflict with China, especially in Taiwan and the South China Sea, then anything that we depend upon them for is going to be broken off from the supply chain,” he said.
Lee said that while he has not seen any evidence that China is planning to hack into inverters at U.S. plants, the country has a history of leveraging its inroads into foreign infrastructure. He pointed to the Chinese military’s Volt Typhoon operation, which the FBI and Homeland Security Department have said involves burrowing into critical infrastructure such as water and electricity systems to be in a position to later disrupt the systems in a future conflict.
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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